Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/88

76 But the defence is that the man had shown himself dangerous to the welfare of the State, and so had justly- forfeited his rights. When we reduce a man to a slave, making him a thing—we can plead no extenuation of the offence. The slave is only "guilty of a skin not coloured like our own,"—guilty of the misfortune to be weak and unprotected. For this he is deprived of his liberty; he and his children.

Slavery is against nature. It has no foundation in the permanent nature of man, in the nature of things, none in the eternal law of God, as reason and conscience declare that law. Its foundation is the selfishness, the tyranny of strong men. We all know it is so—the little and the great. Better say it at once, and with Mr Butledge declare that religion and humanity have nothing to do with the matter, than make the miserable pretence that it is consistent with reason and accordant with Christianity; even the boys know better.

In the last century your fathers cried out to God against the oppressions laid on them by England, justly cried out. Yet those oppressions were but little things—a tax on sugar, parchment, paper, tea; nothing but a tax, allowing no voice in the granting thereof or its spending. They went to war for an abstraction—the great doctrine of human rights. They declared themselves free, free by right of birth, free because born men and children of God. For the justice of their cause they made solemn appeal to God Most High. What was the oppression the fathers suffered, to this their sons commit? It is no longer a question about taxes and representatives, a duty on sugar, parchment, paper, tea, but the liberty, the persons, the lives of three millions of men are in question. You have taken their liberty, their persons, and render their lives bitter by oppression. Was it right in your fathers to draw the sword and slay the oppressor, who taxed them for his own purpose, taking but their money, nor much of that? Were your fathers noble men for their resistance? when they fell in battle did they fall "in the sacred cause of God and their country?" Do you build monuments to their memory and write thereon, "Sacred to liberty and the rights of mankind?" Do you speak of Lexington and Bunker-Hill as spots most dear in the soil of the New